BuzzFeed was forced to cut its 2016 revenue target from $500m to $250m after missing its 2015 target by more than $80m
Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

BuzzFeed missed internal financial targets in 2015 and had to substantially cut its projected revenue by about half, according to a report published by the Financial Times on Tuesday.

According to the FT, the company has been forced to cut its 2016 revenue target from $500m to $250m after missing its 2015 target by more than $80m. The company reportedly projected revenues of $250m in 2015 but generated less than $170m.

A spokeswoman for BuzzFeed did not immediately return a request for comment. “We are very comfortable with where the digital content world is going and think we are well-positioned,” a representative told the Financial Times in an unattributed statement. The company did not provide other figures.

The revenue figures come in the midst of costs cuts across the media sector, at organisations including Mashable, the International Business Times, Al Jazeera America and the Guardian.

The news is a major blow to BuzzFeed, founded by Jonah Peretti, which was once the darling of the news media industry.

Its rapid growth, built on the back of “clickbait” stories and “listicles”, initially had advertisers and investors clamouring to be associated with the brand.

However, while BuzzFeed continues to see growth in its distributed publishing, the content it creates for sites such as YouTube and Facebook, traffic to its own sites has fallen slightly.

The combined worldwide mobile and desktop traffic to BuzzFeed.com fell by 14% from 330m to 287m between April last year and March this year, according to figures from SimilarWeb.

Analysts argue that BuzzFeed’s revenue figures may well be a sign that the bubble around brands such as Mashable, Vice and itself may be close to popping.

Industry leaders including Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the world’s largest marketing services group WPP, have raised a number of digital concerns including measurement and engagement.

“It has become extremely competitive for ad revenue out there against the big guns like Facebook which are ploughing ahead, especially in video,” said Richard Broughton, an analyst at Ampere. There are so many more media outlets for ad dollars and there has been a move toward audience engagement over just counting clicks.”

Though there has been speculation about an eventual share sale for years, BuzzFeed has remained in private hands.

But its protection from the vicissitudes of the market is diminishing: some of its backers are themselves publicly traded, notably NBCU and Japanese telecoms giant Softbank.

The NBCU stake seemed to herald a move by old media into the harder-to-monetize digital world; the New York-based television and movie giant also bought a stake in Vox Media, another venture-backed news organization, for another $200m.

Indeed, there is significant old-media ownership in BuzzFeed: Hearst Ventures, an investment arm of newspaper, magazine and TV owner Hearst, led BuzzFeed’s first investment round in 2008 and contributed to its series B and C rounds, as well.

The startup’s approach to the news has created controversy – some staffers have been accused of lifting stories without attribution, and the outlet ran afoul of advertising laws in the UK in January when regulators said an advertorial was improperly labeled.

BuzzFeed has also broken major stories, among them a conflict of interest at the NSA that resulted in the ousting of Teresa Shea, director of the agency’s signals intelligence directorate.